Auto Ark was the first program available for the IIGS that could compress the contents of hard drives, and decompress them on the fly, effectively creating more space for your documents.

I believe the practise first began on the Mac in the early 90s. Rather than use these types of programs anymore, we seem content with hard drives doubling in size every year.

Auto Ark should be praised for introducing this technique to the IIGS, however its implementation was a bit slow. Future upgrades were to address speed, but then Hard Pressed by Westcode Software was soon released and offered much greater speed and multiple compression options. Auto Ark was eventually updated to v1.1, but the archive currently doesn't hold the newer release.